I love my Fromage Friday adventures but have to admit I’ve been getting impatient. There are so many cheeses I’ve heard about and want to try but there are only so many cheese purchases my hips and thighs can tolerate in one week. A tasting at Leadenhall Cheese back in July introduced me to some new cheeses in more pocket-size portions and so when I saw an event advertised at one of my local delicatessens, Cannon and Cannon, I jumped at the chance (and then did a few more star-jumps, just to build up a nice calorie deficit to be filled by cheese).
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Eight Cheeses in One Day…
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September’s Cheese, Please! Challenge – Cheddar
There’s something a bit autumnal in the air, don’t you think? The nights are ‘drawing in’, there’s a chill in the early morning air (and believe me, with two small children I know ‘early’ better than most) and the garden, as well as giving up its tomatoes and chillies, is starting to look a bit sad. We’ve already harvested our first blackberries and have been circling the local sloe bushes in anticipation. After a hot summer of salad and barbeques, my mind is turning to different food; I’m craving something more substantial now, casseroles, pies and soup and bread. And so with all this in mind and with a nod to the changing of the season, I hereby nominate Cheddar cheese as the cheese of the month. Cheddar for me is synonymous with cheesy jacket spuds, the comfort food of my childhood, scoffed whilst watching Grange Hill on a chilly evening. Happy days.
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August’s Cheese, Please! Recipe Round Up – Feta
Feta cheese was on the table for August’s Cheese, Please! Recipe Challenge – and with it the challenge to prove that it’s more than just a salad cheese (although I still got myself a good-natured ticking off from a Greek chap annoyed that I had bracketed it with ‘other salad-style cheeses’ so I hoped that we could do it justice!)
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Rocamadour
I was recently in France for a couple of weeks and it’s fair to say I ate a lot of cheese. A mammoth amount of cheese. An obscene amount of cheese. I took some photos of the cheese and was going to post them all on here but then realised that I would be in danger of looking like the weirdy neighbour in the 1970s that used to invite everyone over to show them their holiday slides over a coq au vin and a Wall’s Vienetta: ‘Here’s me paddling in the river eating some French bread and camembert…and here’s me in the scenic town of Perigueux with a brebis au fenugrec…just me lounging by the pool with a sliver of Roquefort…’ You get the picture. Hello, are you still there?
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Mex in the City: Gringa Dairy
Since starting this blog, I’ve been looking forward to meeting my first proper cheese-maker. Whenever I imagined it, I was usually welly-clad in a field, perhaps with the early morning mist floating over the grass as some cows lumbered into the dairy. It’s fair to say that my fromager fantasies didn’t look much like this:
Looking more Albert Square than Ambridge, Gringa Dairy is situated under a railway arch in Peckham, South London. Peckham has a reputation for being bad-ass rather than bucolic but, beyond the ‘don’t go there or you’ll get stabbed’ tabloid headlines, it boasts an eclectic food scene that encompasses events like KERB, restaurants like Peckham Refreshment Rooms and producers such as new craft brewers Brick. Another new kid on the block, Gringa Dairy was founded by American Kristen Schnepp and makes artisan Mexican cheese.
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Stinking Bishop
I’d heard so much talk about Stinking Bishop that I was starting to think it was some sort of novelty cheese. Dubbed ‘the stinkiest cheese in Britain’ in 2009, it seems to be the marmite of cheese-lovers – you either love it or hate it. My sister’s boyfriend adores it but the Other Half thinks it’s the devil’s work. Its appearance in a Wallace and Gromit film where it raised Wallace from the dead further cemented its reputation as a hardcore cheese.
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Bajan Macaroni Pie (Mac ‘n’ Cheese)
Macaroni Cheese – or Mac ‘n’ Cheese as it’s now known – seems to be everywhere these days. Mac ‘n’ Cheese restaurants, Mac ‘n’ Cheese vans, Mac ‘n’ Cheese pop-up stalls…you can’t move for slipping on some of the gloopy stuff.
As you may have gathered, I don’t get it. For me, it’s nursery food. Bland, boring and not requiring teeth (yes, yes, I can hear an army of Mac fans rising up against me in ire). I like pasta and I like cheese but Macaroni Cheese, well, it’s lacking something (e.g. onions, tomatoes, herbs, chorizo…you get the picture). So when my usually discerning friend Nat came back from a holiday in Barbados raving about the local macaroni cheese dish, I had to investigate further.
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Alham Wood Junas
Mention British farm animals to most people and they’ll conjure up an image of green fields trimmed with hedgerows, black and white cows grazing the grass and chewing the cud. Or maybe fluffy sheep cropping the sparse vegetation on a mountainside. At a push, perhaps some cheeky goats in their perennial eating-the-washing-line stance. What they probably won’t come up with is a herd of black water buffalo, great horns curling over their horizontal ears. But that’s exactly where this week’s cheese comes from. And the buffalo aren’t paddling in the floodplains of Pakistan or India; they’re grazing the pastures of Somerset.
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Greek Salad Bread Tarts
I love bread tarts. Simple to make, no fussy pastry involved and even the most discerning gourmand usually fails to guess they’re eating white bread and butter. I had previously made Cheshire Cheese and Marmalade Bread Tarts but for this month’s Cheese, Please! Challenge I was looking for a way to use Feta.
Greece is one of my favourite countries in the world. My first holiday overseas was to island hop across the Cyclades Islands with my big sister when I was 18. Although the television would have you believe that all young people abroad are staggering about with their vomit-spattered boobs hanging out, we were ridiculously civilized, with not so much as a waiter-snog between us. My memories are often of the food; of fresh grilled calamari, swordfish steaks and thick creamy yogurt and honey for breakfast. We ended up having a food budget of about £5 a day and so lived on Spanakopita (spinach and feta pies) and Greek Salads. (I confess the budget didn’t include beer and ouzo money.)
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Ribblesdale Goat’s Cheese (Smoked)
Mention Hawes in Yorkshire to many cheese-lovers and they’ll think of the Wensleydale Creamery, a big old operation with viewing gallery, museum and gift shop to boot. But recently Ribblesdale Cheese caught my eye – mainly because all of the roads where I live are named after places in Lancashire, with Ribblesdale being one of them; the Ribble valley straddles both Yorkshire and Lancashire, a pretty perilous position for anywhere to take, quite frankly. (It’s fair to say the region has ‘history’.) Also based in Hawes, Ribblesdale Cheese is a slightly smaller operation, with just three staff but one sight of their snowy white goat’s cheese, set off with its brown rind, the colour of a smoky ceiling in an age-old pub and, as ever, size didn’t matter.
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Fromage Homage 